


Dove Songs in the Key of Guitar

by redlittleowl



Category: Persona 3, Persona 3 Portable
Genre: Canon What Canon, F/M, people dying everywhere, screw canon too, screw your headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-28
Updated: 2013-11-28
Packaged: 2018-01-02 21:01:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1061603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redlittleowl/pseuds/redlittleowl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ken plans to kill Shinjiro.</p>
<p>But even the best-laid plans can and will go awry, and Ken sure as sunshine isn't the best planner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dove Songs in the Key of Guitar

**Author's Note:**

> Shinjiro needs more love.
> 
> That's really the only motivation I had for starting this story. And then it galloped off on its own.

There’s a girl that stops by the dorms sometimes to see Shinjiro, after he joins up in September. She’s almost as good at cooking as he is, and she carries a guitar case with her, and when she pulls her guitar out occasionally and sings Ken thinks that she has the best voice he’s ever heard, even better than those singers on Minako’s music player.

Sometimes when she sings, though, her eyes look really sad, and Ken wonders if they’ll look like that in October.

When he does, he has to remind himself that he doesn’t (shouldn’t, has to not) care.

~~~

The second week of September rolls around, and Ken goes out with Minako to eat. They take a different way home, just to take their time and see what the city has to offer, and happen to run across Shinjiro’s friend; she’s sitting on a street corner, her guitar on her knee and her voice soaring through the air like a flock of white birds, and her eyes are sadder than Ken has ever seen them. Her guitar case is open at her side, a scant few one- and five-yen denominations scattered across the felt lining, and Minako waits until her song is done before asking her to join them on their walk back to the dorm.

She looks up at Minako and smiles, but her eyes are still sad, sad, sad, and then she looks at _him_ , and Ken freezes up because—

She’s the same as him. There’s a Persona-user aura about her that Nemesis can smell and he can almost taste and it’s setting off alarm bells in his head until he _remembers_ that somehow she was there, too, when Shinjiro killed his mother, and—

She accepts Minako’s offer and bundles up the few coins in her guitar case before packing her guitar up and slinging the case over her shoulder. As they walk back to the dorm, Ken thinks that maybe he’s found an ally.

He’s sure she can’t possibly stand the fact that someone she knows is a killer, and that’s why her eyes are so sad sometimes, especially when she looks at Shinjiro.

Ken suddenly finds himself caring about what her eyes will look like in October.

(he thinks happy, relieved, thankful, he doesn’t think even sadder)

~~~

She ends up staying the night in Shinjiro’s room, and the glare the brooding teen sends everyone as they walk up the stairs together is almost enough to make Ken doubt his resolve. Almost enough, but not quite.

Later, when Ken is about to enter his room, he hears quiet talking coming from Shinjiro’s room and pauses. There’s a bout of coughing, suddenly—it’s not Shinjiro’s, though; the older male’s coughing fits are usually more suppressed, and this one sounds _much_ more painful than anything Ken’s ever heard from the brown-haired senior. Ken hears Shinjiro say her name—‘ _Suzushi_ ’—and the beanie-wearing teen sounds so _broken_ that Ken almost thinks that he really won’t have to do anything, because if Shinjiro ends up having to live with this pain, then maybe he’ll realize just how much he hurt Ken by killing his mother in front of him in cold blood.

(but then Nemesis hisses and Ken grasps his head in pain and he’s going to have to go through with it anyway because Shinjiro needs to _die_ and it’s the only way to avenge his mother)

~~~

Shinjiro comes down alone the next morning, without his regular pea coat, his beanie in disarray. Akihiko raises an eyebrow at him but says nothing, and the rest of the teens in the dorm follow his lead and don’t pry when Shinjiro begins to take a tray of toast and scrambled eggs and warm honeyed milk up to his room.

Ken isn’t one of the teens.

“Is she okay?” he asks, and Shinjiro stops halfway up the stairs but doesn’t turn around. Akihiko frowns at Ken but says nothing, and the rest of the teens wait with baited breath to see what Shinjiro’s reaction will be.

“She’s sick, Ken,” he replies, and everyone can see that he’s crumbling apart inside from the way his shoulders slump. “She’s really sick. The docs gave her the wrong meds and—” Shinjiro stops, turns around to face them, and Ken is _scared_ of the look in Shinjiro’s eyes. It’s anger, probably some at whoever gave Suzushi the wrong medicine but there’s so much more anger directed at him, as though the teen knows that Ken was listening in last night on some sort of sacred custom and is judging him (way too) harshly for it. “She’s probably going to die within a month, damn it, and you’re asking if she’s _okay_. Don’t bullshit me, kid, I know you were listening last night.”

Ken doesn’t say anything (he can’t, he’s too shocked, and he wouldn’t know what to say even if he could form words at the moment), and Shinjiro walks upstairs with the tray. His door slams seconds later.

No one talks to Ken throughout breakfast.

(and that’s just another thing he’s going to have to kill Shinjiro for in October)

~~~

It’s the thirtieth of September, and Ken still doesn’t know how he’s going to get Shinjiro to abandon the full moon mission until he sees Suzushi.

She’s paler than the doves her voice sounds like, and he can see the vertebrae in her neck when she gently (weakly) pulls her hair to the side and turns her face into the back of the couch. She’s shaking way too hard for someone so sick, and Ken suppresses some primal, shuddering feeling of _something_ (it’s like there’s suddenly a rock and dying butterflies in his stomach, he’s going to be sick) when he sees she’s holding on to Shinjiro’s pea coat to use as

(warmth comfort strength)

a strange kind of blanket. He goes to sit across from her, and she smiles weakly at him.

Like she’s forgiving him. It’s the same smile his mother always wore, when Ken had failed a quiz or forgotten to let the cat out so it could do its business (it’s alright, Ken dear, you learned something valuable this time, there’s always next time), and suddenly Ken can’t take it anymore.

“Tell Shinjiro that he has to meet me behind Tatsumi Port Station on October fourth,” he blurts out, and he runs up the stairs and into his room and locks his door and throws himself on his bed and _cries_.

(it’s not fair because Ken cares about her too now even though she and Shinjiro are helplessly devoted to each other and it’s tearing both the males apart inside to see her in so much pain but Ken refuses to believe she’s actually dying like Shinjiro will be in three days)

~~~

When Shinjiro actually shows up, Ken almost doesn’t go through with his big plan. But he stutters out the first few words of the speech he’d thought of, and it gets easier and easier until—

“Do it.”

Ken feels the air sucked out of him all at once.

“Do it. I won’t stop you. You’re right…I wanted to forget. That’s why I left the group, and tried to suppress my power…But, nothing I did could erase the memory…And now, I find myself here—the last place I want to be. It’s my fault…This is what I deserve. But…let me give you one warning. If you decide to take my life, you’ll end up like me. Just remember that…Even if all you have now is hatred, one day you’ll regret it.”

And suddenly the long-haired man from Strega is there with a gun, a _real_ gun, and he points it at Ken but Shinjiro steps in between them and—

bang

and when Ken opens his eyes Shinjiro has fallen.

The blood on the green-tinged concrete isn’t from Ken’s lance, it’s from two bullet wounds in Shinjiro’s chest and _this wasn’t how it was supposed to go_

 

When the rest of S.E.E.S. arrives, Ken screams.

(because there’s a million thoughts inside his head and none of them seem to be his anymore and he’s never felt such a _divide_ between him and Nemesis and it doesn’t feel right any longer and maybe he was wrong all along)

~~~

When the Dark Hour is over and they return from the dorm after rushing Shinjiro to a hospital, the figure on the couch does not move. No one wakes her—no one wants to tell her that Shinjiro may never recover from the coma he is in.

They’ll deal with it tomorrow.

(only there won’t be a tomorrow Ken thinks to himself, and then wonders where that came from)

~~~

Mitsuru is the first to try to wake her the next morning. Suzushi doesn’t stir.

Akihiko puts a hand on the redhead’s shoulder, and Ken doesn’t need to ask why the heir to the Kirijo Group is crying quietly.

(he never got to see what her eyes looked like in October)

**Author's Note:**

> Or, why I'm glad my headcanon isn't canon, because then everyone would end up dying from taking Persona-suppressants because their Personas either made them go crazy or become psychotic killers (or maybe even both, yeah that sounds fun too.)
> 
> Also ever since the October fourth mission I have passionately disliked Ken with every fiber in my being and even after finishing the game I don't think it's ever going to stop.
> 
> Takaya's an asshat too but jeebus Ken really takes the cake in my opinion.


End file.
